Top to bottom: Nintendo 3DS © Nintendo Co., Ltd. Movidius Myriad 3D © Movidius Ltd. All rights reserved.

CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue on   3D Mobile Multimedia in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP)

Top to bottom: LG 3D Mobile Phone conceived by Petr Kubik. Nokia 3D Mobile Video © Nokia Corp. All rights reserved.

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There is no doubt that mobile computing will replace PC-based computing for the average consumer. Already, more than half of the world population use cell phones or other mobile devices, more mobile phones are used to browse the Internet than PCs, and the average person is more likely to use a handheld device than a PC for a variety of applications. Mobile devices, which today have integrated video cameras, 3D hardware accelerators, fast CPUs, large memory, BlueTooth and/or WiFi, as well as the rapid advancement in wireless networking technology such as 3G and 4G networks, have contributed to this trend. At the same time, we are witnessing a move towards the mass consumption of 3D media. While traditional applications such as email, web browsing, music, and video remain popular, there is a significant rise in applications such as 3D video, 3D Virtual Environments, and games. In addition to the obvious rise in 3D video applications, the interest in 3D is not limited to video and impacts the whole Web experience. Browsers have started incorporating 3D display and processing capabilities as seen by initiatives such as WebGL and O3D, Google Streetview is used widely to explore cities and streets in 3D, Microsoft has developed Photosynth which creates 3D scenes from user-generated images, 3D mobile games and social virtual environments, and many other examples that show a rise in 3D media.

Despite the promising nature of 3D media, significant challenges remain to be solved in order to bring them to the next generation computing platforms: mobile devices. Limited battery, limited bandwidth, higher network latency due to the nature of wireless networks, limited processing and display, and heterogeneity of mobile devices are some of the problems that will restrict the usage of 3D media in the mobile platform. Even with 4G networks that provide bandwidths of up to 100 Mbps, one cannot translate the availability of higher bandwidth into continuous consumption of it, because using more bandwidth, even if available, will contribute to more energy consumption and faster battery drainage. Due to these limitations, today mobile 3D multimedia applications are of lower resolution, quality, and interactivity compared to their PC counterparts. It is therefore crucial for next generation multimedia systems to be context and content aware and to design and adapt 3D media to specific configurations and variations of mobile devices. In this special issue, we solicit papers that report research results about supporting interactive 3D multimedia for wireless platforms and in a mobile setting. Topics of interest include the following and similar topics:

1-      supporting 3D audio/video on mobile devices

• energy-efficient 3D video coding, streaming, and rendering in the mobile context
• 3D mobile video/audio capturing and recording
  
• mobile-GPU based 3D video processing
• scalable and adaptive streaming of 3D videos to heterogeneous mobile receivers
• concurrent wireless streaming of multiple 3D video streams to mobile devices
• maximizing the perceived quality of mobile 3D video
• 3D audio and surround sound effect coding, streaming, and playback on mobile devices 

2-      supporting 3D graphic applications on mobile devices

• progressive 3D streaming for mobile receivers
• context-aware priority-based 3D streaming for mobile receivers
• maximizing the perceived quality of 3D rendering on mobile devices
• energy-efficient and mobile-GPU based computing and rendering of 3D graphics

3-      supporting 3D games and Virtual Environments on mobile devices

• reducing network latency among players in multiplayer mobile gaming
• energy-conservative schemes for real-time update transmission among mobile players
• game-context based content adaptation for resource-constrained devices

4-      Human-3D-Interface Interaction and Quality Issues

• improving the 3D experience on mobile displays
• 3D Quality of Experience (QoE) in a mobile context
• quality assessment methods and indicators for 3D mobile media
•  intuitive and efficient interaction techniques with 3D media

Submission
All submission guidelines of TOMCCAP, such as formatting, page limits, and extension of previously-submitted conference versions, must be adhered to. Please see the Authors Guide section of TOMCCAP website for more details: http://tomccap.acm.org/

To submit, please follows these instructions:

1. Submit your paper through TOMCCAP’s online system here, and include a cover letter explaining that you are submitting to the special issue on “3D Mobile Multimedia”.
2.  If you are submitting an extended version of a previously-published proceedings paper, in the cover letter also explain how the new submission is different and extends the previously-published work. Important note: the extension must be technical; i.e., the new submission must include new technical contributions compared to the proceedings version, such as a new method, a significant technical improvement, a new approach, a new feature, etc. Simply more explanations and/or more performance evaluations compared to the proceedings version are NOT considered technical extension!
3. After you submit your paper, the system will assign a manuscript number to it. Please email this number to shervin@discover.uottawa.ca together with the title of the paper.

Important dates
Submission deadline:              January 15 2012
First decision:                         March 20 2012
Camera-ready:                       June 1 2012

Guest Editors
Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
Mohamed Hefeeda, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Romulus Grigoras, INP-ENSEEIHT, France, and Devatics.com